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Taiwan's motherboard manufacturing industry is so tremendous that it can be deemed a cottage industry itself. I can't begin to count the number of manufacturers of mainboards out there...and I won't even try. All across the web you will find reviews for the big name boys such as Asus, ABit, Transcend, Soltek, etc. In this review, you will see the review for a mainboard made by a relatively unknown (well, at least I never heard of it until my father bought this board) company called Azza.
60% Rating: 
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Azza PT-810DMC |
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Test Bed, Graphic Performance
Power
Management
Like any motherboard on the
market these days, this Azza mainboard has the usual options for power
management and methods for power on/off as the BIOS is ACPI compliant. In order
to take advantage of various ACPI features, your OS must support it. Windows 98
and 2000 does.
There are quite a number of power up options.
A couple of them exist in through the keyboard. You can either boot up the
machine through a password or using a hot key when keyboard OnNow functions are
enabled. Under these circumstances, the mainboard scans the keyboard for any
activity waiting for the correct password or hot key even though the system
power is off (the standby 5V is still working and the power LED on the keyboard
is still active).
If you have a PS/2 mouse, you may change the setup in the BIOS
and use mouse clicks to turn on system power. You can also boot up the PC at a
particular time and date which makes it useful for performing scheduled tasks
during unsupervised operation. Regular modem ring in and Wake on-Lan features
are available as well.
Test Bed Setup
For performing the benchmarks on the Azza PT-810DMC,
the following hardware was used:
- Celeron 400 CPU
- Azza PT-810DMC
motherboard
- 8.4GB Quantum Fireball CR (ATA/66 enabled)
- 96MB PC100
SDRAM (CAS-2)
- 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 AGP
- Windows 98
Graphics
Performance
As previously
mentioned, this Azza mainboard comes equipped with the Intel 810 GMCH to provide
for your normal everyday and 3D accelerated graphics. The point of the
comparison is not exactly to put down the graphics subsystem of the 810, but
rather to provide you, the viewer, with what to expect when it comes to 3D
performance and decide for yourselves whether or not the performance is
satisfactory to your needs.
For comparison purposes, I have used the 3dfx
Voodoo3 3000 AGP to go up against the 810 GMCH.
As you can see, under Quake2, the
Voodoo3 3000 totally dominates the 810 GMBH. And remember that this motherboard
does not have an AGP slot so you cannot upgrade your system with a
high performance AGP based 3D accelerator card. Your options are pretty limited
to a few TNT2 based boards and to the Voodoo3 3000 PCI card. There are other
cards out there, but you are really restricting yourself to choices, not to
mention restricting the level of performance. So think carefully!
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